Search Results: eureka street

'It's hard for a guy to cry endlessly and helplessly. It is. Some remote part of you shouts Man, get it together, this is totally beyond the bounds. But I couldn't stop.' Four previously unpublished poems by Portland author Brian Doyle, who died on 27 May last year.

These are people living precariously: pregnant women, families with young children, elderly people. They are being 'transitioned out' of Status Resolution Support Services based on 'job-readiness'. The move not only illustrates the arbitrary nature of immigration policy, which sets people up to fail; it is institutionalised sadism.

At the time of his death in July last year, Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu was the most commercially successful Aboriginal Australian musician to ever grace this world. Anyone expecting Gurrumul to resemble anything like your typical popular music documentary will be quickly dissuaded. Gurrumul was a far cry from your typical popular musician.

These initiatives are sideshows, grubby and voyeuristic. They mask the simple truth: that governments have the duty to respect people as human beings and not ciphers, to provide benefits that help people to live with self-respect, to take responsibility for the disadvantage of Indigenous Australians and to involve them in its healing.

In Hebrew traditions and in the Old Testament, the personification of wisdom was always that of a woman, known as Sophia. This carried to early Christian texts in which Jesus was held as female divine. Uniting Church minister Rev. Dr Sally Douglas talks about the qualities that made Jesus compatible with Woman Wisdom.

Tully is a funny film, with a serious core: a tribute to the labour of child rearing, a dissection of the substantial physical and emotional burden of this work, and a 'show-don't-tell' critique of the social norms that frequently sees that burden fall, still, primarily on women.

On the surface budgets are exercises in financial accountability. At a deeper level they are best understood as a yearly ritual; one of the ways in which rulers acknowledge and try to manipulate truths about state power. We should evaluate these less on their stated intentions but with what the show of competence and generosity reveals.

For the past several years, education has been treated as solely a technical problem. One of the pitfalls of this is that political will becomes a function of money, which in turn rests on political expedience between federal and state governments, further complicated by external lobbying. Education gets ground to a grain.

The boys conquer one hazardous feat after another: entering the ocean via rocky cauldrons; sharing waters with a mythic giant shark; tackling waves that rear up over a deadly shallow reef. In so doing they confront their fears: of physical peril; of failing, or failing to meet the expectations of the group; of existential ordinariness.

One of the challenges that faces any society is how boys will become men. In many societies the passage is mapped and enacted through ritual initiations or through military training. It also periodically causes great anxiety. Two recent books encourage reflection on different aspects of the passage from boys to men.

How does sport elevate and constrain our understanding of what it is to be a man? Luke Ablett is a former professional football player, who played for the Sydney Swans from 2002 to 2009. In this episode, he talks about what led him to advocate for gender equality, and the questions raised by toxic masculinity.

The banking royal commission has already come to resemble the earlier child abuse royal commission. To observers who share a personal and public-spirited interest in the decent functioning of institutions, the similarities invite reflection on why two apparently different forms of institution should behave in such similar ways.